Yesterday’s Street League preliminary qualifying finals comp in Seattle produced some amazing skateboarding. Watch all the footage from the Key Arena thanks to TWS cameras in this clip and their round up of results in the race to get their hands on the $150,000 loot.
Results:
1. Torey Pudwill 86.4
2. Nyjah Huston 85.8
3. Shane O’Neill 77.9
4. Chaz Ortiz 70.5
5. Chris Cole 70.4
6. Mikey Taylor 64.4
7. Paul Rodriguez 59.0
8. Ryan Sheckler 56.1
9. Mike Mo Capaldi 54.3
10. Tommy Sandoval 52.7
11. David Gonzalez 46.0
12. Nick Dompierre 43.0
13. Dylan Rieder 42.5
14. Peter Ramondetta 42.3
15. Billy Marks 34.4
16. Eric Koston 34.0
17. Mark Appleyard 33.6
18. Braydon Szafranski 14.9
19. PJ Ladd 8.8
20. Brandon Biebel 0.0 (Biebel took off to Vegas last minute and didn’t enter)
Baker have never portrayed themselves as clean-cut, nor do they succumb to trends as transparently as handfuls of other companies. While edits are appearing like wildfire implying that skateboarding is still experiencing a comedown from the overdose of HDMA (ever wondered why all that shit is in slow-motion?), Baker haven’t strayed from lo-fi lurker footage at parties and an IMPACT typeface. To put this in perspective, Impact is the font used on all those lolcat macros that dominated the internet for a while. Hardly Brooklyn-based fixie-riding designers flicking imported Lucky Strike ash on their Polaroid collection and doing polejams to Belle and Sebastian is it?
What it is, is fucking rad. Drew is called The Boss for a reason, and that reason is because he runs a tight ship that regularly throws out shitty (read: awesome) footage and crude (read: awesome) decks for beat-up sketchy (read: awesome) riders. I had the pleasure of riding Braydon Szafranski’s ‘Bad Guys’ deck this week and had a baller time doing so. The deck is a garish orange and the graphic is a flick lighter beaming away at you like only a waking baking and shaking hotel room trashing skateboarder can. A Baker design through and through that fits in perfectly with a brand that shoots their team portraits in a liquor store.
The board is an 8” so my clumsy feet aren’t at risk of flopping around like they tend to. There’s deep pockets of potential pop, the concave is shapely and while I’m not nailing full-cab flips down big stairs like Braydon let me just say that bitches don’t know about my slappy noseslides. Bangers bangers bangers.
Yesterday’s Street League preliminary qualifying finals comp in Seattle produced some amazing skateboarding. Watch all the footage from the Key Arena thanks to TWS cameras in this clip and their round up of results in the race to get their hands on the $150,000 loot.